GOP’s open season on Clinton

Democrats are quickly learning the perils of having a de facto presidential nominee in Hillary Clinton. 

With the controversy around donations to her family’s charitable foundation growing, Democrats are bracing for more attacks on the former secretary of State — just the beginning of what they expect to be an 18-month assault on their party’s front-runner. 

Few people on either side of the partisan divide expect Clinton to face a serious challenge for the Democratic nomination. But that advantage also allows the GOP to bring its full arsenal to bear upon her.

{mosads}Democrats feel Clinton has weathered the storm so far, and many blame the media for both stoking and exaggerating its intensity. 

But they also worry that the former first lady is bound to suffer some attritional damage over time.

“You have to define what the concern is,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a New York-based Democratic strategist. “Is there cause for concern in terms of the primary, about her being the nominee? Likely not. But is there concern over the next 18 months until the general election? Yes. Because this is obviously a well-thought-out, planned series of attacks.”

Those attacks for now revolve around the upcoming book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer of the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. 

Even Schweizer admits he has no smoking gun proving that either Hillary Clinton or former President Bill Clinton sought to further the interests of donors to the Clinton Foundation in improper ways.

But as media outlets have done their own reporting of issues first raised by the book, unflattering stories have emerged about matters as disparate as the Russian takeover of a Canadian mining company; the sheer amount of money the former president has earned from his speeches in recent years; and the appointment of 

Hillary Clinton’s brother Tony Rodham to the board of a company that operates a gold mine in Haiti. 

Jim Manley, a former top aide to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), acknowledged that “Republicans aren’t going to give up on this come hell or high water. It is something that they [the Clinton team] are going to have to address sooner or later.” 

The furor over Clinton Cash comes on the heels of revelations regarding Clinton’s use of a private email account and server during her time as secretary of State. 

The email controversy erupted before Clinton had officially announced her White House bid, and many Democrats rued a response they believed was sluggish, flat-footed and, even at its climax — a news conference held by Clinton at the United Nations — uninspiring.

Now that Clinton is officially running, her campaign has been much more aggressive. The Clinton Cash book drew forceful counterblasts from Correct the Record, a pro-Clinton group dedicated to pushing back against media criticism of her, and from the campaign itself. More generally, reporters and editors are already becoming accustomed to being contacted by Clinton aides within minutes of stories about her appearing.

The aggressive response is itself testament to Clinton’s stand-alone status among Democrats — a stark contrast to a Republican field that could easily grow to include 20 candidates.

Even the candidate herself has already alluded to her unusual position as the sole target of conservative attacks.

“It’s worth noting that Republicans seem to only be talking about me,” she said a week ago, during a campaign stop at a furniture manufacturer in Keene, N.H. “I don’t know what they’d talk about if I weren’t in the race.”

Some Democrats take comfort from Clinton’s front-runner status — and from the belief that Republicans will begin to attack one another in due course.

“We talk about her now in a vacuum because she is clearly a prohibitive favorite, but the Republican candidates are going to get their turn in the barrel soon enough,” said former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, a Democrat who held office from 1999 to 2003.

Hodges, who backed then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary in his state, also argued that Clinton’s standing this time around was “an indication of her strength within the Democratic Party. It’s not as if there is a shortage of people who would like to be president.”

Still, the controversies that have bored down on Clinton have clearly already had some effect. Several recent polls have shown an erosion in her standing. 

A Bloomberg Politics poll earlier this month indicated that 48 percent of the public see her favorably and 44 percent unfavorably. In early March 2014, the same pollsters found she had a 56 percent favorable and 38 percent unfavorable rating.

A similar slide was seen in Gallup surveys, where her favorability rating has fallen from a net positive 22 points in February 2014 to a net positive 6 points this month. And last month, when an ABC News/Washington Post poll asked adults nationwide if Clinton was “honest and trustworthy,” the result was an exact split, with 46 percent on each side.

Clinton still has many advantages, and she leads all the plausible GOP candidates in hypothetical match-ups for now. But Democrats still look with some trepidation at what is to come.

“Hitting her now is smart,” Sheinkopf said, “because if [Republicans] can keep at it for 15 months or so, it will certainly leave whoever the Republican nominee is with a wounded target.”